Turbacon Day

The Essentials:

What You’ll Need

Bacon.

Thanksgiving Leftovers.

Chocolate Chip Pancakes (with whipped cream).

Elf and other holiday classics.

Bacon.

Loved ones.

Coffee.

Mimosas and/or Bloody Mary’s

Bacon.

Thanksgiving, along with Christmas (or your belief’s equivalent) and Halloween, are the three major holidays that many Americans close out their year with. If you throw in New Years for good measure, these four annual celebrations are reminders of who is really important in our lives, even if we can’t always be with them.

Well, my family apparently loves each other more than most because we needed a fifth holiday.

Thus Turbacon Day was born.

Turbacon day falls on the fourth Friday in November, commencing immediately upon the completion of your Thanksgiving celebration and a good night’s sleep. I would like to have you believe that it was conceived of some high-minded anti-consumerism rooted deep inside my family that lead to a boycott of the Black Friday insanity, but the truth of the matter is it has more to do with effectively curing a hangover than it does our society’s misguided priorities.

Turbacon Day starts off with a nice hardy breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes, whipped cream, coffee, mimosas, bloody mary’s and of course a lot of bacon. This feast segues flawlessly into a lunch sitting where we eat all the leftovers from the night before plus…more bacon.

After about four hours of eating everything in sight with multiple sides of bacon we find the most comfortable nooks of the living room and watch holiday movies. Getting up from one’s seat only happens occasionally, and it’s always either for a bathroom break or to grab another plate of leftovers to snack on. No other reasoning is generally accepted. This continues well into the night, when we finally order a couple of pizzas (maybe bacon as a topping?) to wake everybody up before their long trips home.

Turbacon Day is like Thanksgiving only bacon…errr I mean better. Why? Well first of all because of the sheer amount of bacon that’s included in the holiday, but more so for the reasoning behind it…there is none. We don’t celebrate Turbacon Day because we’re obligated, we do it because we wake up in the morning and just want to chill out for the day and avoid the I-95 traffic going home.

Don’t get me wrong, I am one of the biggest mushes around when it comes to getting excited about the more traditional holidays, but I think Turbacon Day is unique in that we’re getting together for the fact that we genuinely like hanging out with each other, not because it’s a ‘proper’ holiday and we ‘really should be with family’.

So if your family doesn’t suck (I know some of them do…), and they’re traveling in to see you. Invite them to stay the next day and celebrate a little more. This way you can spend Friday far, far away from the maelstrom that is called the mall most other days of the year and celebrate the fact that you really can stand each other. Even on days proper etiquette doesn’t require you to do so.